Tag: Veterans

This post comes from the exhibit catalog for “Right to Serve, Right to Lead: Lives and Legacies of the USCT,” an exhibition inSpecial Collections and College Archives at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College. During the spring of 2017, we asked the CWI Fellows to select a item on exhibit and discuss its history and context. The resulting exhibit catalog is available at Special Collections, where the exhibit will runthrough December 18, 2017.

Larkin Woodruff, 50th USCT. 75th Anniversary of Gettysburg medals. Veterans attending 75th Anniversary commemorations wore medals like these full of symbolism. The bundle of wooden rods surrounding an axe is a classical symbol called a “fasces.” In Roman times, it stood for martial strength through unity and brotherhood and brotherhood. Sadly, Larkin Woodruff died just weeks before the 75th Anniversary Commemoration in Gettysburg, PA. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Gettysburg College.

Between June 29 and July 6, 1938, approximately 1,870 Union and Confederate veterans gathered at that fateful battlefield where many of them had fought 75 years earlier. The veterans stayed in camps and took part in various ceremonies and parades, including a parade of veterans from all wars since 1863, as well as a military flyover. The highlight of the ceremonial events, however, was the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial on Oak Hill outside of town. President Franklin Roosevelt made the dedication speech on July 3, 1938, around the same time Pickett made his charge 75 years before. More than 200,000 people attended, watching the friendly reunion of men who had once been enemies. Together, two men—92-year-old Union veteran George N. Lockwood of Los Angeles, CA, and 91-year-old Confederate veteran A.G. Harris of McDonough, GA—undraped the flag covering the memorial.

This post comes from the exhibit catalog for “Right to Serve, Right to Lead: Lives and Legacies of the USCT,” an exhibition inSpecial Collections and College Archives at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College. During the spring of 2017, we asked the CWI Fellows to select a item on exhibit and discuss its history and context. The resulting exhibit catalog is available at Special Collections, where the exhibit will runthrough December 18, 2017.

USCT Veterans on Parade, Easton, PA. Postcard. Black veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic were, like their white counterparts, very active in the realms of commemoration and politics. “Decoration Day,” the precursor to our modern Memorial Day, officially started with the GAR in 1868, and served both purposes. Courtesy of Special Collections and College Archives, Gettysburg College.

For many United States Colored Troops, remembering the Civil War and their comrades who fell in it became an important part of their post-war life. One of the primary opportunities for public expression of remembrance was Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day. African Americans played a critical part in the creation of this holiday. On May 1, 1865, the newly-freed black residents of Charleston asserted their place in Civil War memory by leading a parade to a recently constructed cemetery for Union prisoners at the city’s horseracing course. The procession heaped flowers upon the graves of the honored dead, after which ministers from the town’s black congregations gave dedicatory speeches. This event, known among some in the North as the “First Decoration Day,” exemplified African American interest in perpetuating the memory of the Civil War. However, the resentment of white Southerners at the time towards this instance of black agency led to the marginalization and eventual forgetting of the event in the mind of the public at large.

The current U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs traces its origins to the Civil War. Before the Civil War, there had been some attempts to provide services for veterans but these benefits were solely for career military veterans and not volunteers. Since Civil War veterans were mostly volunteers, this became a problem. The services provided before this had been mostly in the form of homes like the U.S. Naval Asylum in Philadelphia where veterans could receive long-term care. Many felt that homes were the best way to care for soldiers and so, in March of 1865, legislation passed to create a national asylum for disabled volunteers. On November 10, 1866, the first branch of three national homes was established. At first, the branches were open to all Union soldiers who could prove a connection between their service and their injury. They then later welcomed veterans of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War as long as they didn’t fight against the Union in the Civil War. Confederate veterans were never allowed. Each home had a barracks, dining halls, hospital, cemetery, and recreational facilities.

The eastern branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Togus, ME. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the historians scheduled to speak at the 2016 CWI conference about their upcoming talks and their thoughts about Reconstruction and its legacies. Today, we’re speaking with Jason Phillips, the Eberly Professor of Civil War Studies at West Virginia University. He is the author of Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and the editor of Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). He is currently at work on a second book, Civil War Looming: A History of the Future, which examines how Americans anticipated the Civil War and how those prophecies ultimately shaped their experiences and memories of the war.

CWI: What obstacles—physical, emotional, political, social, financial, cultural—did the Confederate veteran face upon returning home, and how did he seek to deal with them? In what ways did Confederate veterans’ expectations of returning home match with the reality of the homecoming experience, and in what ways were they unprepared for or confounded by the realities of their homecoming?

PHILLIPS: As your question suggests, defeat stared Confederate veterans in the face in every facet of their lives. Failure was a physical, emotional, political, social, financial, and cultural fact that confronted and confounded returning rebels. Patrick Gilmore’s song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” encapsulated how Confederates anticipated their homecoming. Communities would welcome returning heroes with fanfare. Church bells would peal with joy. Reality mocked such dreams. But if Confederates were unprepared for defeat, they were also unprepared for federal leniency. Many rebels expected the government to punish treason. The Confederate rank and file didn’t fear personal imprisonment or execution, as their generals and political leaders did, but they dreaded disfranchisement, confiscation of property, and a prolonged military occupation of the South. What happened was far less severe, and that federal leniency in 1865 emboldened Confederate veterans to resist Radical Reconstruction years later.

Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the historians scheduled to speak at the 2016 CWI conference about their upcoming talks and their thoughts about Reconstruction and its legacies.Today, we’re speaking with Anne Marshall, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University. Marshall’s most recent publications include Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and “The Jack Burden of Southern History: Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, and Historical Practice,” in Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South, ed. by Jason Phillips (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

CWI: What role did memory, memorial associations, and the prolific creation of Civil War monuments play during the Reconstruction era?

MARSHALL: The efforts of both former white Confederates and white Unionists to commemorate the memory of the dead and surviving soldiers played a significant role in helping the American public deal with the trauma of war. Monuments and veterans associations became about much more about honoring the past, however. They also served as an effective way to shape the present during Reconstruction. Union veterans associations like the Grand Army of the Republic served as an advocacy group within the Republican Party, while black Union veterans often drew upon their service in the U.S. Army as grounds for obtaining and retaining the rights of citizenship in the post-war era. Most notably, white southerners created an entire worldview surrounding the concept of the Lost Cause, which they wielded to turn back the tide of federal Reconstruction and maintain white supremacy. In many ways, the very different aims of memorial groups who channeled the memory of the Civil War toward different ends became a way of continuing to fight the war in culture and in policy well after the fighting on the battlefield was over. Continue reading “Southern Reconstruction and Constructed Memory: Anne Marshall Talks Veterans, Heritage Groups, and Reconcilation”

Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the historians scheduled to speak at the 2016 CWI conference about their upcoming talks and their thoughts about Reconstruction and its legacies. Today, we’re speaking with Lesley Gordon, Professor of History at The University of Akron. Gordon’s publications include: General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and their Wives (Oxford University Press, 2001), and This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath (Longman, 2003). Her latest book, A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War, was published in 2014 by the Louisiana State University Press.

CWI: What challenges and opportunities did US veterans encounter upon returning home from the war? What was the process of re-assimilation back into civilian life like? How did that process vary across different regions, classes, races, and ethnicities?

Gordon: Union veterans came home after the war hoping to return to normalcy. Demobilization happened quickly, especially considering how many soldiers had served and how long this “terrible” war had lasted. However, many found resuming their prewar lives difficult. Some of course did successfully return to their families, jobs and lives and blended smoothly and quietly into postwar society. We know more about those who struggled and failed—they simply left more records or drew more public attention. Some veterans were recovering from lingering wounds, physical, emotional and psychological ones. Yet, increasingly all veterans realized that they faced a changed postwar society, and a civilian population largely ready to move on. By the turn of the century, a growing perception of the Union veteran was that of the dependent pensioner, reliant on the state for care and financial support.

Gettysburg, a town already so intimately acquainted with war, was the scene of particularly interesting historical encounters. The still too present memory of the Civil War impacted the way Gettysburgians viewed the Great War. Many veterans of the Civil War were still alive, although very old, and it was not uncommon for The Gettysburg Times to run headlines about the death of a prominent Civil War veteran right alongside coverage of the war raging in Europe. As the Red Cross in Gettysburg began all-out efforts to raise money to aid refugees in Belgium, the town of Frederick, Maryland, just to the south of Gettysburg, was still pushing the United States government for war reparations amounting to $200,000 for damages done by Confederate General Jubal Early’s raid.

For such a young man, William Henry “Lebbie” Lebkicher (Company D, 122ndRegiment PA Volunteers) appears in his Civil War Era letters as a keen observer of society. Curiously, he rarely spoke of the larger war or even his friends from the regiment. The few people he alluded to are family members or family friends, mostly in discussion of their well-being. The letters are more a collection of observations on his experiences than a series of back-and-forth conversations with his father. His thoughts are insightful and fairly objective. On one occasion, he noted that the bounty payment was late and some soldiers were getting “a little tired of waiting” for it, though he did not explicitly express his own frustration even though he, too, was awaiting payment. Nor did Lebkicher allow himself to be overexcited by the military’s vibrant rumor mill, dismissing whispers of a march on Richmond in August 1862 on the grounds that there were “so many rumors here that you cannot believe any of them.” His healthy skepticism was a trait that he would later put to good use as a thrifty businessman while working with Milton Hershey in a number of roles, including as the first Vice President of the Hershey Trust Company (established in 1905).

Veteran war stories are some of the most fascinating windows into the past that students of history can experience. With World War II veteran numbers quickly diminishing and the risk of these accounts of history being lost, the importance of collecting and passing on veteran stories to future generations is vital. Such was the case with those who fought in the Civil War. As the twentieth century approached, droves of veterans began disappearing from the pages of history. The need for those veteran stories from America’s bloodiest war to be recorded and published became not only important to the veterans themselves but also to students like myself who have a genuine interest in studying how the Civil War was remembered by its soldiers.

Despite Francis Clarke’s argument that men who suffered in exceptional ways, such as amputees, were regarded as national martyrs and held up as the emblem of sacrifice to the nation, this argument cannot be applied wholesale to all exceptional sufferers in the post-war North. Although men who lost limbs in battle were often remembered in terms of glory and treated as national heroes, those who suffered in non-heroic ways, such as prisoners of war and the victims of non-combat related accidents, were often treated as less deserving of honor.

Brian Matthew Jordan, discussing amputees, argued that the empty sleeve of the veteran itself embodied the idea that he has termed the Won Cause, a counterpart to the Lost Cause tradition. Within the Won Cause, veterans had not lost their arms, but instead sacrificed them for a just cause. The sight of a pinned-up sleeve noted the bearer’s integral role in a moral cause. And yet, the way in which a veteran suffered might shift the way he was perceived in society.